


Five times it was expedient for Toph to leave the country in a hurry.

by lalaietha



Series: Ten Thousand Things [18]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: 5 Things, Canon Disabled Character, Gen, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-06
Updated: 2011-04-06
Packaged: 2017-10-17 16:42:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/178878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lalaietha/pseuds/lalaietha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What it says on the tin. For various values of "country."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five times it was expedient for Toph to leave the country in a hurry.

1\. The nice thing about courier balloons was that they were much faster than either walking or sea-travel. You could get from the furthest island to the capitol in less than two days, at speed. So Zuko didn't have to wait all that long for Toph to actually physically be standing in the same room as him, so he could ask, "What are you _doing_?"

Toph was in the remains of what looked like it had once upon a time been a nice dress. Now most of the skirt was ripped off so that it was somewhere around Toph's knees, and the sides had been ripped up to give her freedom of movement, and she was filthy, and her hair was mostly a disaster. "I ran away from my parents again," she said, matter-of-factly, as she wolfed down the food he'd had brought.

"That much is obvious," Mai remarked, from where she was sitting with her legs over the side of the chair she was in; Zuko shot her a look that he _hoped_ conveyed his sincere wish for her not to help just right now, please.

"Without stopping for a change of clothes?" Zuko asked, folding his arms.

"We had a difference of opinion," Toph said. "I thought I should come visit you."

"By stowing away on a ship?" Zuko pressed. There was another shoe. It was going to drop, and this was _Toph_. She hated boats. She hated the ocean. She hated everything that wasn't solid ground under her feet.

She sighed. "Okay," she said, with her mouth full of of starfruit that she swallowed before going on, "so maybe our difference of opinion kind of ended up with me levelling most of my parents' house and then leaving the guys from the regiment whose commander they bribed to come after me with their feet and hands stuck in the middle of the road. That's _not_ my fault. They started it."

Zuko pinched the bridge of his nose. "So you decided to come here?"

"Well," Toph pointed out, "I thought about going to your uncle, but that's still Earth Kingdom, and there's really nowhere in the Earth Kingdom my parents can't buy people. But you're the ruler of a completely independent nation, so they don't have any power over you."

Spectres of the diplomatic entanglements that were about to come down on his head unfolded in Zuko's mind, but he had to admit, she had a point.

Later, Mai asked, "What was she fighting with her parents about?" in the tone of voice that you could only get from someone who, like they did, took parental idiocy for granted. It occurred to Zuko that, out of the whole lot of them, all - more than eight, depending on how you counted, they had a total of two sane parents, that he knew of; he wondered about Suki's, before he pulled his attention back to Mai's question.

"They're overprotective."

There was a pause, and then Mai said, "Have they _met_ her?"

 

2\. _Nephew,_

 _On the off-chance that the Bei Fong parents contact you about your ward's whereabouts in the next little while, or if they are trying to reach her, I wish to advise you that she will be staying at the Northern Air Temple for at least a few months, or until the Earth King has managed to repair the eastern wing of his palace and his menagerie, or until such time as the Avatar elects to bring her to visit you._

 _If he does the latter, you should know that she will be bringing a baby badgermole, although it may be less of a baby when it gets there, as I regret I do not actually know how long it takes them to grow, at least not off the top of my head._

 _It seems to mostly eat root vegetables._

 _With great affection,_

 _Your Uncle_

 _PS: If you think the presence of the baby badgermole might have something to do with the destruction of the palace and the reason Toph needs to be somewhere other than the Earth Kingdom for a while, you would be right. I'll let her tell you the story, though; she tells it better._

 _\- Iroh._

 

3\. Normally, Aang would have been really happy to see Toph, actually. But today, after the negotiations over north-west, he was just looking for some place to sleep that didn't include any people having huge, ridiculous, world-altering arguments about something as stupid as whether or not someone had sent a big enough present to someone else's daughter's wedding to not be an insult, because of the size of a present that someone _completely different_ had sent for the birth of someone else's son.

The Northern Air Temple had seemed like a good place to get it. Except Toph was waiting on one of the ledges, and the minute he'd set his feet down announced, "C'mon, Twinkletoes, we need to find Zuko."

Aang leaned on Appa's side and scrubbed a hand over his face. "Is there going to be a war, or a murder, or a spirit world catastrophe within the next ten hours?" he asked, and Toph frowned.

"Probably not," she conceded.

"Then I'm going to sleep. _Then_ we'll go."

It looked like she was going to argue for a minute, before Appa rumbled and Toph took another look (metaphorically speaking) at Aang. Then she said, "Well, you do feel kind of exhausted. Okay."

"Okay," Aang agreed, and yawned. He should have known better than to ask, at least until he'd had something to eat, but curiousity overcame sense and the question, "Why do you need to go so bad, anyway?" came out of his mouth.

And Toph skipped completely over the bad joke and instead replied, "I need him to make a formal declaration as my legal guardian that I can't get married."

After a good half a minute, Aang gave up and said, " . . . . huh?"

"My parents," Toph said darkly. "Again. Dad gave up on soldiers when Zuko talked him into giving over guardianship, but since I turned fifteen Mom's been sending _suitors_ at me, and I had to bodily throw the last one out of my room."

Aang thought about that. "Did he survive - "

"Teo caught him before he hit the ground," Toph said, waving the concern away. "Go get some sleep, Twinkletoes, and hopefully there won't be a new one already here in the morning."

 

4\. When the face of Mount Itai slid, demolishing the pass and cutting Lord Oshi's small but fast-moving army off from Admiral Jinse's landed troops and effectively ending the Jinse Rebellion in two nights (it was a large slide, with many aftershocks), it was agreed to have been the result of natural causes.

It had to be. The slide was monumental, and there was no way any earthbender short of the Avatar could have done it, and the Avatar firstly had made a public statement about his intentions to stay out of internal matters in the Fire Nation, and secondly had been working in the North Pole to try to soften the blow of the ice-shelf collapse that had killed Arnook at the time.

When it was pointed out, a little later, that the earthbending Bei Fong daughter, technically a ward of the Fire Lord, was also known to be extremely powerful, it was immediately noted that she and the Fire Lady had quarrelled, at immense volume (and with some displacement of the palace grounds) and that furthermore, she had been seen in Ba Sing Se on the same day that the slide had occurred, and the two days previous.

No, it was at the very least a simple natural disaster, and _perhaps_ even a strong statement of the earth spirits of the area against the rebellion, at that.

These things happen.

 

5\. When she ignored him and pulled her pillow over her head, Twinkletoes shot her up off the pallet and out from under the blankets with a whoosh of air, and then didn't even have the decency to be standing on the ground so she could retaliate once she figured out which way was up again.

Sitting (he had to be) on one of his little air-balls, Twinkletoes said, "C'mon, Toph! We need to go!"

"Go _where_?" she demanded, disgruntled, then ignoring him for a minute so she could feel out where her clothes were and pull them on, since she didn't put it past him to whirlwind her over to Appa at this point.

"What do you mean, go where?" Aang said, sounding like he was frowning at her. "Katara's having her baby."

Oh. _Right_. For a minute Toph was caught up trying to remember where her gift was - well, gifts, one was the jade carving, but since a kid wouldn't appreciate that, she also got a doll that one of Sokka and Katara's girl-cousin picked out and Sokka swore was really pretty.

Then she remembered to put up some kind of grumble, seeing as she had been tossed out of bed, and muttered, "Didn't we just do this with Fire Lady Gloomface?"

Momo hit the ground and chittered scoldingly at her, and she heaved an exaggerated sigh. "Alright, alright, I'm coming, let me get my stuff."


End file.
